When President Lee Jae Myung recently urged his Cabinet members not to let safety worries become an excuse to cancel school field trips, he was making a familiar point: Some risk is inherent in any worthwhile experience.
In the abstract, few would disagree. Students benefit from learning outside the classroom, and a government that values those experiences should invest in the necessary staffing, training and safety protocols.
But many teachers heard a different message, one that underestimates how liability and conflict now dictate daily life in schools. The issue is not whether field trips matter; it is who bears the consequences when something goes wrong, and what that reality is doing to public education.
Field trips concentrate the problem because they bring uncertainty into view. A student slips, a bus breaks down, or a minor misunderstanding escalates into a legal crisis. In many schools, the task of preventing, explaining and absorbing the fallout falls on the teacher. Additional chaperones help with supervision, but they do not change the underlying accountability structure.
If teachers are treated as the default party to blame, you can’t blame the response to reduce exposure: Cancel the trip or avoid any activity that could trigger a complaint.
This logic is increasingly visible inside the classroom, too. Teachers describe an environment where routine discipline or intervention can trigger a complaint that quickly takes on a legal or quasi-legal character.
Some complaints are legitimate; schools, like any institution, can fail. Yet when procedures for distinguishing serious grievances from bad-faith complaints are opaque, everyone behaves defensively. Teachers shy away from intervention for fear of repercussions, while admin staff become wary of backing them and students learn, implicitly, that conflict is resolved not through conversation but through escalation.
This is not a story about “difficult parents,” nor is it uniquely Korean. Many nations are struggling to balance student protections, parental involvement and teacher authority in an age of heightened rights consciousness. South Korea’s situation has been exacerbated by the evolution of its education system: a powerful state role, intense social expectations for academic excellence and a high-stakes exam culture that siphons time and energy toward test preparation.
Over time, teachers have been pushed toward a narrow, utilitarian conception of the profession: Deliver content efficiently, keep the class quiet and produce results. Parents often treat schooling as a service for their child’s advancement. Consequently, teachers are recast less as professionals exercising judgment and more as service providers whose decisions are perpetually negotiable and contestable.
Meanwhile, an older cultural expectation persists: that teachers should command respect and shoulder responsibilities well beyond their job descriptions. At its best, that expectation recognizes the fundamental role of trust that students need an adult guide, and families must believe schools act in good faith.
But trust cannot be one-sided. When a system demands near-total responsibility from teachers while treating them as presumptive wrongdoers, it invites the opposite of what it wants to achieve: risk-aversion, minimalism and disengagement.
The debate over field trips suggests a practical starting point: liability. Advocates have long argued for shifting responsibility for accidents in school-directed activities away from individual teachers and toward the state and the education authorities that oversee public schools.
Often caricatured as special pleading, the idea reflects a basic organizational principle. When employees carry out public duties under institutional directives, the institution provides legal representation, insurance and clear standards of accountability. Public school teachers should not be the exception.
A redesigned liability system would not mean blanket immunity. Cases involving gross negligence or intentional wrongdoing should be handled with rigor. The goal is to ensure that teachers who act in good faith and follow common-sense protocols are not personally exposed to ruinous financial claims or criminal proceedings simply because an accident occurred.
When the penalty for an honest mistake or sheer bad luck can be career-ending, the system effectively stifles initiative and professional commitment.
There is a deeper question beneath the diminishing respect for teachers: What, exactly, does Korean society want teachers to do? Dutch education theorist Gert Biesta argues in his book “The Beautiful Risk of Education” that schooling is not only about credentials or socialization but about helping young people become independent individuals through encounters with others, and that “education must embrace risk and uncertainty.”
When systems attempt to eliminate risk entirely, they discard the very experiences that make schooling formative — group projects, conflict resolution and small responsibilities that help students grow.
President Lee is right that schools should not abandon experiences that matter. But a “snarky” presidential comment is not policy. If South Korea wants teachers to take students beyond the classroom (literally and figuratively) it must align responsibility with authority, protect good-faith professional judgment from frivolous or retaliatory complaints, and give parents a dispute process that is fair, fast and credible.
Otherwise, the safest choice for teachers will remain to do less, and students will live with the consequences.
- - -
Lim Woong
Lim Woong is a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Yonsei University in Seoul. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.
khnews@heraldcorp.com
